I just updated my What I’m Reading list, and realized that I’m now reading 13 books at the same time. While this makes for an interesting interplay between the various plots in my befuddled mind, it tends to mean that some of these books, I may never finish. I think I’ve been reading Little Dorrit for 2 years now, and Chasing Shadows for about 1 year. Dandelion Wine, of course, I read every year, so that hardly counts. So maybe 12 is more realistic. I need to make a concerted effort to finish some of these.

I just signed up with Audible.com, which is a audio book service where you download audio books to listen to on some electronic device. In my case, on my Palm Tungsten E. The quality is very good (at least, for me, with my admittedly low standards) and I can also listen to them in the car, with one of those cassette tape car adapters. Mine, however, is just about to give up the ghost, and takes some wiggling to make it play correctly. For $15 a month you get one audio book a month, as well as a daily “subscription” like the New York Times. The audible.com software is painfully unintuitive, and it took me nearly an hour to get my first book onto my Palm, after which I still wasn’t sure how I had done it, so I’m not sure that I’ll be able to do it any faster next month. We’ll see.

My new Stowaway wireless IR keyboard arrived today. It’s pretty neat, really. Rather than having a hardware connection, it has an IR “wand” that you position above the Palm device, and communication is done via IR.

On the minus side, the latch that holds the thing shut is amazingly hard to open. One of those things where you’re sure you’re going to break it before you get it open. I hope it will loosen up after I’ve used it a little while.

Of course, I’m writing this with the keyboard. 🙂

It appears that the code that I posted earlier has the unfortunate side effect that comments are associated with the wrong articles. I’m not entirely clear on how this happened, but it looks like I have a lot of work ahead of me to make them line up again. I’ll look at this in more detail tomorrow and try to supply another patch that will generate export files that line up correctly. 🙁

I’ve completed the migration, and I thought I’d pass along some accumulated knowledge. It seems that people have gone to a great number of contortions to make their MT URLs continue to work under WP. I believe I have a simpler solution. Just force WP to use the same ID numbers as you were using with MT. This involves making the following changes.

First, you need to edit the module that handles MT exports. This will be at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm

In sub export you’ll find a blob of text that starts with $tmpl->text(< <'TEXT'); and defines the template with which stuff will be exported. To that blob, add a new field: ID: <$MTEntryID$>

No. Placement doesn’t matter.

Then you’ll need to edit import-mt.php. This is located in the wp-admin directory on your new WP installation. You’ll need to make the following changes.


@@ -225,6 +225,9 @@
case 'AUTHOR':
$post_author = $value;
break;
+ case 'ID':
+ $post_import_id = $value;
+ break;
case 'TITLE':
$post_title = addslashes($value);
echo ''.stripslashes($post_title).'... ';
@@ -277,9 +280,11 @@
} else {
$post_author = checkauthor($post_author);//just so that if a post already exists, new users are not created by checkauthor
$wpdb->query("INSERT INTO $tableposts (
+ ID,
post_author, post_date, post_date_gmt, post_content, pos
t_title, post_excerpt, post_status, comment_status, ping_status, post_name, pos
t_modified, post_modified_gmt)
VALUES
- ('$post_author', '$post_date', '$post_date_gmt', '$post_content', '$post_title', '$excerpt', '$post_status', '$comment_status', '$ping_status', '$post_name','$post_date', '$post_date_gmt')");
+ ('$post_import_id',
+ '$post_author', '$post_date', '$post_date_gmt', '$post_content', '$post_title', '$excerpt', '$post_status', '$comment_status', '$ping_status', '$post_name','$post_date', '$post_date_gmt')");
$post_id = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT ID FROM $tableposts WHERE post_title = '$post_title' AND post_date = '$post_date'");
if (0 != count($post_categories)) {
foreach ($post_categories as $post_category) {


In other words, you’re forcing the import to use the IDs that you want it to use.

Once you’ve done that, import the resulting export file, and add this to your Apache config:


# Movable Type -> WordPress fu
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/journal/(index.html)?$ /wordpress/ [PT]
RewriteRule ^/journal/archives/(.*?).html /wordpress/index.php?p=$1 [PT]
RewriteRule ^/journal/index.rdf$ /wordpress/wp-rss2.php [PT]


… of course, modified to reflect whatever URLs you happened to be using.

Just when I was coming to the end of my reading list, I found this list of 438 “MUST READ” books. Thanks for nothing. 😉

I went with TheHeretic to see Rush on their 30th Anniversary Tour.

It was amazing.

By the time they took their halftime break, I figured they had already done most of my favorite pieces. But they came back after the break and did the rest of my favorites, as well as a many that were completely unexpected – at least by me – such as Subdivisions, La Villa Strangiatto (along with a *very* strangiatto ad lib spoken piece by Lifeson), The 2112 Overture, The Trees, and an amazing rendition of Xanadu.

Neil did “Pieces of Eight“, which is a drum solo that doesn’t actually appear on any album that I’m aware of, but I’ve heard on a bootleg recording. I knew he was a mind-bogglingly good drummer, but the power of being there to hear it was stunning.

They opened with a retrospective piece which sampled from all of their albums, accompanied by photographs and video from the last 30 years. This led into The Spirit of Radio, the delightfully self-deprecating song from Permanent Waves about the music industry.

Throughout the concert, the visuals were sprinkled with footage from past concerts, as well as psychadelic light shows straight out of the Rush early days.

The crowd was fascinating, too, with people wearing tshirts from the 1976 Rush tour, and kids that can’t have been born when Roll The Bones came out. And a huge number of them appears to know all the words.

I knew all the words. Well, almost all. I didn’t know all the words to Earthshine, or to Working Man, perhaps the newest and oldest songs that they did. 🙂 They also did two songs from the new album, which is to come out at the end of this month. They were selling posters for the new album, but nothing actually said anywhere that it was the new album. Strange.

They played Dreamline, Bravado, and Mystic Rhythms, which are three of my all-time favorites. They did Tom Sawyer, YYZ, One Little Victory, Resist, Red Sector A, Secret Touch, Limelight, By Tor and the Snow Dogs, and Between the Wheels. I’m sure there were tother things that I’m forgetting, which will come back when I hear the songs the next time.

I’ve never actually been to a concert before. Well, not in an arena like this. I heard The Beach Boys after a Cincinnatti Reds game, and I heard Chicago at a little private concert at Internet World 1997, in the height of the Dot.Com days. But this was quite an experience. Although we were pretty far back — at the front of the lawn section — the sound was still enough to twitch all of my clothing every time Neil hit the drums.

And it all leaves just one question. Why does the goat have the receipts? For that matter, where does a goat even keep receipts? I know. Do you?

Some pictures from the week at Big Nerd.

I wonder what God thinks about people that sin in his name. As Christians and Muslims kill one another in Nigeria people seem more concerned that Obasanjo called someone an idiot.

What to say after a colonoscopy